Puppet MastersS


Eye 1

Best of the Web: Police state USA - The creation of a border security state

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The zone pictured is what the ACLU refers to as the "hundred-mile rule", which stipulates that Border Patrol can do a warrantless search on anyone who is within one hundred miles of U.S. coastlines and land borders. These Homeland Security officers have federal, extra-constitutional powers that are well above and beyond those of local law enforcement. It appears to have been adopted without any public debate or scrutiny
With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, "You can't go in there, give me back your badges."

The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it.

The students from Northeastern Illinois University didn't happen to fall into that category. An earnest manager at a nearby registration table insisted that, as they were not studying "border security," they weren't to be admitted. I asked him how he knew just what they were studying. His only answer was to assure me that next year no students would be allowed in at all.

Among the wonders those students would miss was a fake barrel cactus with a hollow interior (for the southern border) and similarly hollow tree stumps (for the northern border), all capable of being outfitted with surveillance cameras. "Anything that grows or exists in nature," Kurt Lugwisen of TimberSpy told a local Phoenix television station, "we build it."

Airplane

FBI adds people to No Fly List for refusing to become informants

No Fly List
© Bogdan Cristel/ReutersInnocent people are being put on the no-fly list as coercion or punishment by the FBI, a lawsuit alleges.

Naveed Shinwari hasn't seen his wife in 26 months. He suspects it's because he refused to become an informant for the FBI.

In February 2012 Shinwari, who has lived in the US since he was 14, flew to Afghanistan to get married. He says that before he could get home to Omaha, Nebraska, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. A third FBI visit followed when he got home.

The following month, after Shinwari bought another plane ticket for a temporary job in Connecticut, he couldn't get a boarding pass. Police told him he had been placed on the US no-fly list, although he had never in his life been accused of breaking any law. Another FBI visit soon followed, with agents wanting to know about the "local Omaha community, did I know anyone who's a threat", he says.

"I'm just very frustrated, [and I said] what can I do to clear my name?" recalls Shinwari, 30. "And that's where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don't have a job; we'll give you money."

Shinwari is one of four American Muslims in a new lawsuit who accuse the FBI of placing them on the no-fly list, either to intimidate them into becoming informants or to retaliate against them for declining.

Filed on Tuesday night in the US district court for the southern district of New York, the case accuses the US attorney general, Eric Holder, the FBI director, James Comey, the homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, and two dozen FBI agents of creating an atmosphere in which Muslims who are not accused of wrongdoing are forbidden from flying, apparently as leverage to get them snitching on their communities.

Camera

Los Angeles cops already using spy drones for 'predictive policing'

Video Surveillance
© Screenshot from Center for Investigative Journalism video

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department secretly used a civilian aircraft to monitor the 10-square-mile area of Compton in 2012, recording high-resolution video of all that happened n the region.

"We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people," said Ross McNutt of Persistent Surveillance Systems, according to The Atlantic.

This type of surveillance, which was used to find suspected bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan, allows police to zoom into recordings Google Earth-style.

The technology can stay in the air for six hours and is being marketed to police departments across the United States, allowing police to rewind recordings to watch areas they couldn't monitor in real time.

Sgt. Douglas Iketani of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department openly compared the secret test to Big Brother, though apparently it didn't make him stop short of using it.

"This system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public," Iketani said to the Center for Investigative Reporting. "A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so to mitigate those kinds of complaints we basically kept it pretty hush hush."

Gear

Eurasian project: Eyeing pipeline, Russia forgives North Korean debt

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© flickr/ Bernt Rostad
On Friday Russia's parliament voted to write off roughly 90 percent of North Korea's debt as Moscow seeks to build a gas pipeline through the Hermit Kingdom.

This weekend Reuters reported that Russia's Duma voted to write off roughly $10 billion worth of the debt that North Korea owes Moscow from the days of the Soviet Union. The vote ratified an agreement made in September 2012, after a meeting between then-President Dmitry Medvedev and then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Siberia in the summer of 2011.

At the time the agreement was first announced, The Guardian reported, citing Russia's Finance Minister Sergei Storchak, that Moscow would forgive "90% of the debt and reinvest $1bn as part of a debt-for-aid plan to develop energy, health care and educational projects in North Korea." Russian experts hailed the agreement as a sign that North Korea's leadership was looking to initiate market style reforms in the reclusive country.

Attention

Agenda 21: The BLM land grabbing endgame

Land Grab
© The Truth Wins
Why is the federal government so obsessed with grabbing more land? After all, the federal government already owns more than 40 percent of the land in 9 different U.S. states. Why are federal bureaucrats so determined to grab even more? Well, the truth is that this all becomes much clearer once you understand that there is a very twisted philosophy behind what they are doing. It is commonly known as "Agenda 21″, although many names and labels are used for this particular philosophy.

Basically, those that hold to this form of radical environmentalism believe that humanity is utterly destroying the planet, and therefore the goal should be to create a world where literally everything that we do is tightly monitored and controlled by control freak bureaucrats in the name of "sustainable development".

In their vision of the future, the human population will be greatly reduced and human activity will be limited to strictly regulated urban areas and travel corridors. The rest of the planet will be left to nature. To achieve this goal, a massive transfer of land from private landowners to the federal government will be necessary.

So the conflict between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM is really just the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that the BLM has their eyes on much bigger prizes.

Dollar

U.S. responsible for Ukraine crisis after investing $5bn in destabilization and regime change

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© AFP Photo / Genya SavilovArmed men wearing military fatigues gather by Armoured Personnel Carriers (APC) as they stand guard outside the regional state building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk on April 16, 2014.

The US is to blame for the events in Ukraine as it invested $5 billion in regime change in the country, taking a more radical stance that its EU allies, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's envoy to the UN, said.

"It seems it was the Americans, who tried to push through the most radical scenario," Churkin said in an interview with Rossiya 24 channel. "They didn't want any sort of compromise between [ousted President Viktor] Yanukovich and the opposition. And, I think, they came to the conclusion that it was time to cash in those $5 billion and handle the matter towards abrupt regime change, which, eventually, happened."

This explains why the US, but not the European Union, took center stage when the coup resulted in legal vacuum in Kiev, he added.

US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland told CNN on Monday that Washington has invested around $5 billion into supporting democracy in Ukraine since the fall of Soviet Union.

But Churkin has doubts about Nuland's claims, saying that "any sane person would, at least, say that those investments didn't pay off."

"If those $5 billion were spent on support of democracy, but not overthrow of the existing government and regime change, then no democracy has triumphed there [in Ukraine]," he explained.

Bad Guys

Flashback World War III, the elite and the 'great game'

world map
The control of the US, and of global politics, by the wealthiest families of the planet is exercised in a powerful, profound and clandestine manner. This control began in Europe and has a continuity that can be traced back to the time when the bankers discovered it was more profitable to give loans to governments than to needy individuals.

These banking families and their subservient beneficiaries have come to own most major businesses over the two centuries during which they have secretly and increasingly organised themselves as controllers of governments worldwide and as arbiters of war and peace.

Unless we understand this we will be unable to understand the real reasons for the two world wars and the impending Third World War, a war that is almost certain to begin as a consequence of the US attempt to seize and control Central Asia. The only way out is for the US to back off - something the people of the US and the world want, but the elite does not.

The US is a country controlled through the privately owned Federal Reserve, which in turn is controlled by the handful of banking families that established it by deception in the first place.

USA

U.S. drone strike kills 18 un-Americans in Yemen

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© AFP/Mohammed Huwais

A Yemeni boy walks past a mural depicting a US drone and reading " Why did you kill my family" on December 13, 2013.
A drone strike Saturday killed 15 Al-Qaeda suspects and three civilians in Yemen's central Baida province, a stronghold of the extremist group, a security official said.

The jihadists were travelling in a vehicle towards the southern Shabwa province, witnesses said. The three civilians were passing by in another car.

The United States is the only country that operates drones in Yemen, but officials rarely discuss the covert programme.

Last month, Yemen's President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi defended the use of drones against Al-Qaeda in his country, which has killed dozens of militants in a sharply intensified campaign over the past year.

Drone strikes "have greatly helped in limiting Al-Qaeda activities, despite some mistakes, which we are sorry about," Hadi told the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.

Red Flag

Liberty based conservative group's tax-exempt status revoked by IRS over anti-Clinton statements

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© Patrick Henry CenterPatrick Henry arguing a case at the Hanover County
Courthouse that would be a major step in the American revolution.
The Internal Revenue Service has revoked the tax-exempt status of a conservative charity for making statements critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, according to a USA Today report.

The Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, based in Manassas, Va., "has shown a pattern of deliberate and consistent intervention in political campaigns" and made "repeated statements supporting or opposing various candidates by expressing its opinion of the respective candidate's character and qualifications," according to a written determination released Friday by the IRS.

The IRS said the center acted as an "action organization" by publishing alerts on its website for columns written by its president, former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Crusader

Pope breaks rules again: washed feet of disabled people - women and non-Catholics - in pre-Easter ritual

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© Tony Gentile/ReutersPope Francis washes a foot of a disabled person at the S. Maria della Provvidenza church in Rome, during the Holy Thursday celebration, April 17, 2014.
Pope Francis washed the feet of 12 disabled and elderly people Thursday - women and non-Catholics among them - in a pre-Easter ritual designed to show his willingness to serve others like a "slave."

Francis' decision in 2013 to perform the Holy Thursday ritual on women and Muslim inmates at a juvenile detention center helped define his rule-breaking papacy just two weeks after his election. It riled traditionalist Catholics, who pointed to the Vatican's own regulations that the ritual be performed only on men since Jesus' 12 apostles were men.

But as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio frequently performed the ritual on women - a practice that he seems intent on keeping up now that he is pope.

Comment: 12 whole people? Wow! How nice that the Catholic church has put forward such a kind, compassionate man as their representative. Where's the list of pedophiles who are running rampant in the Church?